Examining the adoption of relationship marketing orientation by global B2B ecommerce organizations in China and the moderating impact of uncertainty avoidance dimension

This dissertation aims at finding out how global business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce organizations in China adopt relationship marketing orientation (RMO) examined in six factor constructs including trust, bonding, communication, shared value, empathy and reciprocity for the improvement of business performance in terms of return-on-investment, sales growth, market share and customer retention as proposed by Sin, Tse, Yau, Chow, Lee and Chow (2002). A cross-sectional and quantitative research based on a non-experimental, objectivism and positivism paradigm is conducted to test the proposed hypotheses and answer the two research questions: to what extent does the adoption of RMO by global B2B ecommerce organizations in China impact their business performance; and does uncertainty avoidance have a moderating impact on the associational relation between RMO and business performance? The empirical analyses of data collected from 174 China suppliers through an online survey show that RMO has a statistical significantly positive relation with business performance, and uncertainty avoidance has a positive moderate impact on the research model. Results also reveal that there are significantly positive relationships among RMO and four business performance measures comprising return-on-investment, sales growth, market share and customer retention. With respect to the relatioinships among individual RMO construct and business performance measure, communication is found to have significant and positive relationships with return-on-investment, sales growth and customer retention, whereas shared value has significantly positive relationship with return-on-investment and empathy on customer retention. Surprisingly, trust and reciprocity are found to have insignificant relationships while bonding has negative relationships with all business performance measures. Findings of the study contribute, 1) to fill the gap in extant relationship marketing literature that have not tested the moderating impact of uncertainty avoidance between the relationship of RMO and business performance in the context of China global B2B ecommerce, 2) to add to the growing body of research and increase generalizability of the RMO framework across Western and Eastern culture and, 3) to stimulate scholars’ interests in future research of how RMO impacts business performance in other industries in China. This study also provides implications for effective management of relationship marketing through the implementation of high quality communication mechanisms to improve customer relationships and organizational behaviors. Therefore, overall business performance will be maximized through the adoption of RMO.